Susan and Mohammed

Fifteen-year-old Mohammed has taken a break from his GCSE revision to talk to me. He can hardly recall the Iraqi Kurdish city of Kirkuk where he spent his first six years, but he does remember his long, cold and hungry journey hidden in the back of the lorry that brought him to England. He is well aware that Saddam Hussein's soldiers beat his father close to death in front of him and took him away for ever, and he knows that England feels different: "You can see it in people's faces. In Iraq they were always worried. Here we don't have to be scared."

His mother, Susan, remembers much more. When Saddam's men arrived in the early hours of an October morning in 2000, she knew to be afraid. They had already shot her brother in 1991 in a mass execution in front of the family home, and while she was pregnant with Mohammed they took away her husband, Salaam, and then put her in prison. I know that she has been looked after in London by the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, so I ask how she was treated in prison. She looks away. This is not something she wants to discuss: "It was very bad, very rude. They beat you and they asked you for bad things … I was very worried I would lose the baby."

She and her husband were released before Mohammed was born and Susan returned to work as a cashier. But the fear remained, especially as her husband was active in opposition to Saddam's anti-Kurd regime (notorious for the poison gas attack on the town of Halabja in 1988). In 2000 the family's fears were realised. Soldiers arrived and beat Salaam in front of his wife and son. When six-year-old Mohammed cried, the soldiers hit him across the face, and Susan's screams were met with rifle butts. Her shoulder has never fully recovered.

The soldiers left with Salaam – who has never been seen again – and threatened to return. Susan knew she had to leave. Passed from agent to agent, she and Mohammed travelled on foot and by horse, boat and overcrowded minibus – staying in safe houses and avoiding border guards – through Iraq, Iran and Turkey.

Rowing a boat across a fast-flowing river brought another awful moment when Susan saw her handbag – containing the documents that were all she had to prove her story – washed overboard. "I cried like a child."

Finally came the lorries: days and nights hidden among filthy cargo with only a torn tarpaulin for cover. They couldn't move, speak, eat or empty their bladders. Susan had to give Mohammed sleeping pills to keep him quiet. Sometimes he slept for so long that she would panic: "In my brain was just one thing: I've lost my family, my husband, I don't want to lose my son."

She had no idea where they were: "They never tell you where you are going." It was only when the back of the last lorry was opened by police in Dover that they discovered they were in Britain. Susan spoke no English. It was a disorienting time, she says, "like a dream or a film … You think life is ended, but as you get to know the place life restarts."

Mohammed spent the early days in Britain drawing picture after picture, all of soldiers with guns, of what happened in Kirkuk the last time he saw his father. It was distressing for Susan but as therapy it seems to have worked. Mohammed no longer remembers the violence or the drawings. His concerns are football, boxing, exams and his plans to study science. Susan, too, has a new life. At the Medical Foundation, she met Fouad, another Kurdish asylum seeker. They are now married with a daughter. "She speaks perfect English," says Susan proudly.

Gervais and Gervelie

Gervelie was six when she arrived in Europe. "It was really cold and I had never seen many white people, except in films. I was afraid of escalators – I thought they were going to eat me. And we had no money. We couldn't even buy lemonade. When we did, it was the happiest day.

"My family was quite wealthy in Africa. We had big houses and maids. Now we were here in one tiny room with two beds and a little bathroom. And we didn't speak English – I had to learn fast."

Gervelie, now 15, is here with her father, Gervais. He ran a travel agency in Brazzaville, Congo, and was a member of the Pan-African Union for Social Democracy (Upads). In 1997, a coup led to a bloody civil war. "There were rockets flying past and guns everywhere," Gervelie recalls. Gervais's political opponents won the war and he found himself on a hit list: "People I knew were being abducted, tortured, found dead."

He and Gervelie left the capital to stay with an uncle in Congo's second city, Pointe-Noire. Gervelie's mother – who had moved away during the war – was living with one of the warlords of the dominant party, which put Gervais in even greater danger.

He was shot in the ankle in an assassination attempt before militiamen turned up at his father's house and shot dead his father and cousin. Gervais fled to his village and stayed in the bush for nine months. An uncle he had stayed with was arrested and tortured. Gervelie's mother took her back to Brazzaville. Gervelie was pleased to be with her mother and new siblings, but she missed her father and her stepfather beat her with sticks. Despite her experience of war, Gervelie says the worst violence she has witnessed was her stepfather "beating a man half to death. There was blood everywhere and my stepdad was going to get a gun to kill him until his father stopped him. And all because the man had stolen our wheelbarrow."

Gervais moved to Ivory Coast, where his mother had a house and she then went to Brazzaville and collected her granddaughter. "I had no notice," says Gervelie, "I wasn't even allowed to say goodbye to my baby [half-] sister because Mum said she'd cry."

Gervelie hasn't seen her mother or sister since. She used to get upset, but they now speak on the phone and send gifts via travelling relatives.

Gervais and Gervelie started a new life in Ivory Coast, but in 2001 war broke out there, too. "It was as if we were carrying war in our luggage," says Gervais. They had no passports, but friends in the travel business got them to Britain on fake IDs. What Gervais calls "the long scary process of claiming asylum" began badly with an airport immigration interview. "This black man asked my name and date of birth," says Gervelie. "I didn't know what was going on, so I mumbled. Dad tried to answer for me and this man shouted at him. He was horrible." Gervais adds: "He called me a liar in front of my child. Her life had been traumatic and now she had to listen to it all again."

They were sent to Ipswich, where Gervelie started school. But three months later, just as she was making friends, her father was given four hours' notice that they were being moved to another city. "I cried so much that day," says Gervelie. They were transferred to Norwich, among the first asylum seekers sent there. "There were hardly any black people at first," says Gervelie, "so we were stared at." But not with malice – everyone has been kind and welcoming, they say, and both now feel lucky to be there.

Gervelie – a bubbly, articulate teenager – now gives talks to primary pupils about her experiences. Gervais works for the Red Cross as a local coordinator of refugee services. He doesn't intend to stay in the UK permanently. "I monitor what is going on back home. I am still involved in [Congo] politics and when it is safe, I hope to go back to help to change lives there."

He knows Gervelie may not want to go too. "She has had a very unsettled life and now for the first time she has settled. In three years she will be 18 and can make her own decisions."

There is no doubt, though, how close the two have become. "She is a support to me as well as me to her," says Gervais, "We've had a hard time together, but also a beautiful time."

Gervelie says simply: "He is my dad and my best friend."

The Dzhavatkhanovs

Within minutes of arriving at the Dzhavatkhanovs' council house in east London, I have three kittens on my lap, tea, cake and four friendly people sitting round me: parents Tamara and Zelim, Kheda – a lively 11-year-old girl who wants to be an actor – and her brother, Hamzat, 17. Another brother, Zaurbek, 21, is busy upstairs. Over the next couple of hours we laugh a lot – despite the tale they have to tell.

The family is from Grozny, capital of Chechnya. Hamzat recalls "broken buildings, holes in the ground and bombing nearly every night". They lived in a five-storey building, but the top three floors had been blown off. The Dzhavatkhanovs spent each night in the rat-infested basement. There was no running water, gas or electricity and Tamara had to cook on a makeshift fireplace she built outside.

Russian soldiers would come knocking ("or kicking") at any time of day or night, Tamara says. Zelim had served two years in the Russian army but when one of the intruders spotted his old uniform hanging up, he accused Zelim of having killed a Russian soldier. "Every Chechen male aged 12 to 65 was considered a [likely] terrorist," says Zelim.

"I was tortured and kept in a hole for three weeks."

"It was just war, war – 13 years just crossed out of your life," says Tamara.

On a sunny April day in 2001, just as they thought things might be calming down, Hamzat, then seven, was walking to school with two friends when he stepped on a landmine. His friends were killed and he had to have a leg amputated below the knee. Hamzat was still in hospital when the Russians attacked it. Tamara says: "I carried him and hid in a fireplace, covering him with my body. It was ping-ping – bullets flying everywhere." Back at home, Hamzat was out on his crutches when a stranger approached. She was from Unicef, the United Nations Children's Fund, and wanted to help Hamzat get a prosthetic leg. It was a three-day journey each way to the fittings and the first leg's leather strap rubbed terribly and created painful blisters and friction burns. When he put the leg on to go to school, his mother says, "he groaned like an old man". Well, says Hamzat indignantly, "think what I was going through!" He grins.

The charity Ccharm (Children of Chechnya Action Relief Mission) offered to take Hamzat to Britain for a proper artificial leg. At first Tamara was horrified – her little boy, going all that way. But soon Hamzat and his father were in London. When Hamzat's treatment ended, Zelim applied for asylum. It took a year to get leave to remain and another year to bring the others over. It was hard for Tamara to leave: "I was torn. My mother was sick, but she said, 'Go!'" Tamara arrived in Britain with no English and had to rely on Hamzat to translate. At first she was homesick, but when her mother died in 2008 and she went back for the funeral, she says: "I was so surprised – after two weeks I started to miss this country."

She is now doing a catering course and Zelim has retrained as an electrician. Kheda is getting top grades, Zaurbek is at business college and Hamzat is doing AS levels. They feel now that out of Hamzat's misfortune has come good luck for them all.

So where do they consider home? "I don't know," says Hamzat. "I don't think I would fit in back home anymore so it can't really be home."

And Zelim? "Here, of course," he says with a grin. "I'm a Hackney boy."

Mohammed, Hamzat and Gervelie's stories are told in the Refugee Diary series for children by Anthony Robinson and Annemarie Young, published by Frances Lincoln, £6.99. Refugee Week runs from 14-20 June. More information at: refugeeweek.org.uk